Deirdre Reilly: Something’s squirrelly here

Monday

Oct 29, 2007 at 12:01 AMOct 29, 2007 at 6:51 AM

The relationship between people and wild animals has always been an interesting one, and it has usually been pretty lopsided – wild animals look at us and we run. Not much give-and-take to that relationship.

Deirdre Reilly

The relationship between people and wild animals has always been an interesting one, and it has usually been pretty lopsided – wild animals look at us and we run. Not much give-and-take to that relationship.

Of course, there were fictional man-beast relationships that were mutually beneficial; Flipper and Gentle Ben come to mind. On the domestic animal side, Lassie was in a class all by herself, having the talent of being able to bark out, “Hey, June Lockhart, over there baking yet another pie – Timmy lost his marbles again helping an old hermit and is trapped in the mineshaft! I’ll go on ahead, turning about every 50 feet or so to bark in the wind and have my fur ruffle nicely! Come on, June Lockhart, hurry! No time to crank up the phone!”

Generally, we humans seem to lose all sense of reason when we see a wild animal out of context – context being a zoo, a store or a very secure cage. Seeing a mouse in a pet store causes me to say, “Awww, look at this feller! Cutsy-wutsy! If we bought him, I would name him Mr. FussyWhiskers!” Seeing the exact same mouse under my kitchen table while I’m sweeping would, however, cause me to scale furniture a la Spider-Man and scream, “We’re all getting rabies – call the police! Kill it dead – it’s looking at me with beady eyes!”

Recently, nature came roaring into my house in the form of a baby squirrel, who apparently dropped down our chimney and climbed up onto my 21-year-old’s leg while he was sleeping. This squirrel was sitting there no doubt wondering why the 21-year-old wasn’t studying, when my son woke up and looked down to see a baby squirrel lounging on top of him. I guess we should have gone to the zoo more when he was little, because he reported the squirrel as a “gigantic mouse or a freaky-looking bat” when he flew upstairs, white as a sheet, to come get reinforcements. Sadly for him, reinforcements consisted of his mom and his 8-year-old brother, upstairs in their PJ’s very far away from all nature, just as God intended. We all crept back downstairs, clutching each other and squealing in anticipation of initial eye contact with a bat/mouse. We needed weapons, of course, so I carried a Swiffer mop, my 8-year-old carried a roll of Christmas wrapping paper – yes, it takes me a solid 10 months to put things away – and my oldest son carried a miniature plastic hockey stick. After searching mainly with our eyes pinched shut for 20 minutes or so, no dangerous wildlife was to be found, so we trucked back to bed, only to be summoned again by my eldest son’s screeching, “Here he is! He’s in the lamp!” Sure enough, the baby squirrel was staring at my son – no doubt wondering when he was getting his own apartment – with unbelievably huge eyes in proportion to the rest of his face. (The squirrel’s official motto: “We grow into our eyes.”) He had scaled a floor lamp, and was hanging on at the top for dear life. This hanging on and staring routine we of course took as a direct threat of imminent bodily harm, and so we proceeded to scream, just at the mere act of locating the wildlife.

I intended to Swiffer him to within an inch of his life, so I approached, heart pounding wildly, my scared face reflected in the squirrel’s giant eyes. My older son suggested chasing him into the potted plant underneath him, while my youngest son suggested capturing him and petting him and sleeping with him every night. We decided the potted-plant scenario was best, so while I murmured, “Watch out for rabies!” we edged in on him. He stared at us, no doubt wondering why I am still doing my son’s laundry, and he suddenly flew by us, and we screamed like teenagers in a Halloween movie. Now, our combined height is almost 16 feet, we can do math and drive cars, but we were shaken to our cores by a teeny little animal whose only talent is eating nuts and falling down chimneys. Had we seen him in a pet store, we would have named him Mr. BushyTail the First, but here in our family room, he was All That Is Scary About Nature – Incarnate.

We finally captured him in an elaborate series of moves involving the potted plant, an afghan and more screaming, and dumped him into the yard, where he scampered away, nearly thrown off-balance by the weight of his own eyeballs. The next morning I passed a group of little squirrels who seemed to be acting out a little skit right on my lawn, imitating three terrified humans. “That’s OK, at least my eyes are regular-sized,” I sang out, proud of my quick comeback. It’s nice to be the superior species!